


Sedna

by eudaimon



Series: Our Lives Apart [9]
Category: Mythology - Fandom, Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:28:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Icelandic Goddess of the Sea. Both loved and feared by hunters. Her anger causes lean winters.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Sedna

**Author's Note:**

> Icelandic Goddess of the Sea. Both loved and feared by hunters. Her anger causes lean winters.

 In the dark days in the middle of winter they leave the ice and come down into the heart of the town. They come silently, their great feet leaving barely tracks in the hard snow and the permafrost. Nothing so big should ever know how to move so quietly.

 

And yet.

 

They come along the roads which meet in the town, lonely as gods, huge as the ghosts of whole nations. They forage in the trash cans and dumpsters, no dignity left, no grace. There is a sadness, a bone deep sorrow, in starving. Now, they round them up in trucks and drive them far away from their homes but, once, there were the leather and fur clothes cut and sewed by each man's wife to be worn for the rest of his life. There was the harpoon and the long bone spear. In their guts, what they know is this: that blood spills black in the endless night and that a thing which suffers can very easily become a thing which hates. Underneath fur the colour of glaciers, the great bears are as black as the water under the ice.

 

This winter has been long and hard and hurtful.

 

The people wrap their babies in fur and skins embroidered with pictures which tell the story of the last time that the bears came down off the ice like this because the whales and the seals hadn't come. They sing their babies to sleep and then they go to their own beds fearful that they'll wake to the sound of breaking glass and splintering window-frame. So few creatures kill not merely because they must but because they _can_. Humans, house-cats, the great bears; there is a thrill in seeing a thing realise the fact of its own death. Always, the fear. So they keep watch, and all the while desperately wrack their brains. They keep watch over the babies, the bone spear not nearly so natural to them as it was to their forefathers and mothers. And they are always wondering....

 

What did they do last time, to make Her so angry? What did they do, and how did they come to make amends?

 

*

 

_SeaWorld, Florida._

Once upon a time there was a dark place at the bottom of the great ocean and it reminded her of hell. Fathers are so good at failing to understand the needs of daughters. She had loved him once. Outside. Above.

 

Down here, closer to the middle of the world, it's warmer, wetter. The moisture in the air doesn't freeze here, and they go around in clothes which leave their legs and shoulders bare. No tears freezing in eyelashes. No need for thick furs. Even so, her hands retain their chill. She makes a cup out of them and blows against the rough wool of her mittens. In the dark behind the thick, thick glass, something swoops and sings. She presses her lips against the glass and whispers.

 

_I have loved you so well for so long, little lost part of me._

 

The children flock around her, touch the layers of her clothes and her mittened hands like she isn't there, or like she's there but there's nothing about her that frightens them. She's so used to frightening the babies. She drags her gloves off and a small child, tow-headed, her eyes the colour of the heart of a glacier (under the dirt caught in the permafrost where everything is purest blue) touches the scarred skin which is clubbed like a fin.

 

"Why haven't you got any fingers?"

 

_Because my father didn't love me or loved me too much and when I tried to climb back into the boat, he cut off all my fingers so that I couldn't hold on. Because I wouldn't drown, or my husband wouldn't keep me. Because the Great God of the Sky was angry. Because I didn't want to die, sweetheart. Because I didn't want to die_.

 

It was never the children that she hated. She finds a smile somewhere in the chilly heart of her and touches the poppet gently on the head. She grants her long life and hopes that she'll always live in warm enough places that the great bears will never come to find her babies while they sleep.

 

It was never the women that she hated, either.

 

These great caverns, walled in fist thick glass remind her, a little of the place where she sat, sucking on the stumps of her fingers until the bleeding stopped. Her walls had been ice and rock. She had been alone at the bottom of the world, and she had been so, so angry. It had been so quiet there. That had been the worst thing. Here, the noise never stops; the hum of conversation, of ambient temperature control and the great water tanks meant to simulate oceans. They don't do a good job of mimicry but she doesn't mind; she spent so long at the bottom of the great frozen sea, shivering in her caves, waiting for her father to forgive her, even after he died and they gave his bones to the birds. She spent so long down there that she knows that ocean like the back of her hand, so if she never saw another, she wouldn't mourn much.

 

They gave him a nonsense name when they brought him here and put him in this mimic-sea, too small and not cold enough by far. The children come and scream and turn their faces up to feel the salt water splash. It's much warmer than it should be. Down here where the sun shines, they can't even imagine how cold it can be up near the top of the world.

 

_Shamu_ , they call him. The sounds mean nothing. She presses her lips against the glass and she asks him what names he has for himself.

 

_Surface breather. Deep diver. Seal Killer. Sea's heart. Ocean's king._

 

_Brother,_ she tells him. _Brother, I'm sorry for your losses but this is what there is now. No more dark and secret places. No more gates to lock. So little real cold._ She doesn't ask for his forgiveness. A whale's heart is far larger than a man's. She kisses the glass and he shows her his sharp white teeth and swoops away, singing his soul-deep, mournful song.

 

It was always the men that she hated. The men with their matted hair, head and face and chest and crotch; their stink; their spit, their faces cast in their fathers' images. Their smell got all over her and choked her. Once, she'd loved one more than she'd hated him but when he'd pushed himself inside her he'd gone so deep that she'd tasted blood and stars and when he pulled out of her again he pulled out so far that he dragged her heart out with him. That was before her father took her out onto the sea beyond the ice in his little skin boat. A daughter is a father's possession until he chooses to gift her to a husband. But what if she gives herself away, and far too soon?

 

Shame. Shame and a one way trip.

 

They'd argued on the boat, her and her father. They'd argued so loud and so long. Her place was not on the ocean; her place was the fireside, the fur floor and the skinning knife. She hadn't been at home in the boat. The men spent days and days at sea. Her father was the king because he could stay out there for longer than any of the other hunters. He had married her mother in a boat of skin-and-bone.

 

He pushed her. She fell. The water was so cold that it drove all of the breath out of her. She didn't stand a chance, but she didn't know that yet. She fought with her every inch. Clinging to the side of the boat, she screamed his name; her father's name, her lover's name, the name of every other man that she knew. Her father hadn't looked at her, his anger burning as two red spots on his cold face above his beard.

 

Hunting knives are wicked sharp.

 

Down she sank, her severed fingers tumbling alongside her. The salt-water stopped her screaming and her bleeding. She was nearly dead by the time she felt the brush of something against her side, like a child come in from playing, pressing the tip of his cold nose into his mother's dress above her hip. She had no words then for _tail_ , _fin_ , _snout._ She just recognised that she was loved.

 

In these days, she knows, the precedent has been set for chilly grey girls in dark places. Usually fatherless. Usually loved to death. Persephone wove dead flowers into her long, long hair. Hel decorated her chamber with the skulls of heroes. Little Sedna, chilly Sedna, prefers rainbow striped yarn, her hair too wet to hold a curl. For a long time, she kept the blue flickering flame of her anger close. She'd cup what was left of her hands around it and warm her palms. What became of her fingers was that they settled on the sandy bottom of the ocean, grew slick fur and fins and great bright eyes. Hel had the giants. The spring followed on the train of Persephone's gowns. Sedna became the Goddess of the things that swam. They were enough. She was never lonely.

 

It's been a long time, now, since she was down there with nobody but the whales and seals that she thinks of as her children, born of her body as they were. She has learned to wander. There are people who come and go where the reindeer lead them; they live their lives on complicated paths that are found neither in rocks or stars. The deer know their ways. Similarly, she wanders according to her own paths. In the old days, when she was angry, she had to stay home and mind her own locked doors when they put them away, all of the fat, good things of the ocean and left only the little creeping things which are never good to eat. It was always the men that she hated but, when she acted, in her anger, the babies and the women starved too. Here, they flock around, the children and their mothers, press their noses up against the glass and catch glimpses of the great whale gliding in the gloom. It isn't her locking the doors anymore. It isn't her keeping the whales and the seals where the bone spear and the skinning knife can't find them. There are places like this on every continent now, fist thick glass and millions upon mills of litres of not quite cold enough water. There are a billion bleeding hearts the world over who don't understand that death is always stalking life. And the world is growing warmer all the time.

 

She pulls her mittens back onto her ruined hands, steps away from the glass and blows him a single kiss, _surface-breather, deep-sea-diver, seal-killer, sea's heart, ocean's king._ There, for a moment, his solemn song changes. He remembers joy. He sings for her, for Sedna, unloved Sedna, who long outlived her father, the king, and so many of the men cast in his likeness. Sedna who bought life out of the ruins. Sedna, who sank and drowned and lived, _lost-daughter, father-hater, man-killer, ocean-mother, fingerless, heart-full forever._


End file.
